


How to Share a Secret

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: Dubious Consent, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 09:08:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The best engineers learn to listen, not just to hear. </p>
<p>Hank and Mike are learning to listen to each other, learning to share the things no one else knows.  They're learning how to hear the gap between what one man says, and what he really means, and what he wants to say where no one can hear it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Share a Secret

Most of the time Hank is just as much a brother as any of them.

But he is still Cap, still the boss, and still there are things they don't know about him. 

There are things they have missed about each other, as ships passing in the night.

The time in service. The growing up. How you stumble from probie to lineman to engineer. The way you feel getting your hands on an engine, a ladder, a truck all yours, a beast to befriend and tame. 

The best engineers have learned to _listen_. Sound is vibration, vibration is touch, kinetic, alive, awake. The tiniest bones of the human body tremble in the ear at the slightest breath, to the faintest tick of the clock on the dorm wall three past midnight stirring in the dark what is it. What is it.

Mike can tell who's in the dorm before his eyes open. Can remember, before he's rightly awake, when some stranger brother's sleeping in his shiftmate's bed.

How to listen: wake up, and close your eyes. 

Mike waking with Hank in bed beside him, all warm and long and lean. Hank sleeps mostly on his side, his arms sprawled out and loose and dangling off the bed. Wakes up some mornings with pins and needles or a stitch in his shoulder. Doesn't complain, but Mike can see it, how he speaks, how he moves.

In his quiet way he got to learning Cap's language long before he got around to learning his intimacy. Cap looked at him sideways sometimes and cocked his shoulders like he did when he was nervous, when the Chief was dropping by, when he had some presentation to prepare for. When Hank was nervous he seemed drawn to the engine, the old beast, he would slip from his office or the dayroom and walk the length of it, and Mike understood. There was a certain peace to it. Walking the engine. Wasn't his engine, of course. Wasn't the engine Hank had grown up with. But it meant the same.

Mike caught him touching the dials once, lingering, and when Hank had noticed him he'd pulled up short, stood up straight, full height, and escaped to his office. 

But that was before they'd slept together. 

Before Mike had found a new way to listen.

Before they found out how to listen to _each other_ , and what a thrill that was, what a beauty of a thing, getting tangled up, laying hands down, slipping on skin, all the senses going wild. Mike had gone with other men before, and he knew how to lead gentle. He thought Hank hadn't. But he wasn't sure. Even so close as they were, he wasn't sure.

Now and then, there was something, something Mike's brain was yearning to hear, something there, just beyond his grasp. 

It was in the shiver, in the twitch, in the rasp, in the damp voice at his ear. Are you sure, Hank would ask him. Over and over. Are you sure. Is this what you want. Don't go telling me you want this if you don't. 

But it was in his captain's nature, to tighten his lips, to frown and fold his arms and _worry_ over the lot of them. When Johnny was sick that time with the virus, when he was in the hospital and they visited him and he was so far away, Hank told him later _you better not do that again, you better not expect me to go easy on you 'cause you had some monkey flu._

But his brow was tight when he said it, and his fists clenched and unclenched, and he gripped Johnny's shoulder and that was Hank's way of saying _you scared me, you scrawny idiot._

At Mike's apartment, in the long dunes, on the breakwater rocks, in the scrub-pine hills, they share secrets together, not deep-water secrets by any means, but the soft kind you just don't get around to telling.

"Used to go camping when I was a boy, you know, in the scouts," Hank says, after lunch on a long hill, on a flat rock scruffy with moss and warm in the sun like a live thing. "You ever in scouts?"

"No," Mike says, "4-H."

"Really? A regular nature-boy."

"Nah, just a stall-mucker."

"My uncle had a farm, in Minnesota. Raised pacers, there. Liked to visit 'em. Liked to watch 'em."

"They fly, don't they. All the way to Minnesota, from here?"

"No, I was born in Iowa. We moved close to my uncle when I was a kid."

"No wonder you never complain when it gets cold." Mike grins.

"It _never gets_ cold here," Hank laughs back. He throws a bit of breadcrust at him. When they kiss on top of the hill in the scrub he tastes like peanut butter, he tastes like sun. Mike would've let him have him right on the rock. But that's not Hank's style and so they sprawl together trading laughs until one half of Hank's face and one arm is pink. 

Mike's cousin has a cabin north of the city, neat and trim on on a hill and down the hill is a long and shining reservoir, and Mike's cousin will trade the cabin and the kerosene for the stove and stock in the pantry for a day or two of Mike's cooking and he finds this is more than a fair tradeoff. He wants to show this secret to Hank: the bracing gleaming water and the red granite and the tall slender swaying pines and the bed with the bleach-soft sheets and the wool blanket that his great-grandfather is rumored to have stolen from a fur trader in British Columbia a long time ago.

Hank tells him that his best friend's father dammed a creek one spring and it filled up with snowmelt and even in the height of summer when the grass was gold and cracked underfoot the depths were black as January and licked cold tongues like ghosts against unsuspecting legs. This water, he says, is almost as cold. He winks when he says it. Mike tackles him. Small fish scatter. Birds calling. Trees and laughing. 

In the dark Hank says, "Are you sure?" 

So Mike kisses him.

They almost manage to pull the sheets off the mattress. Mike could kiss him for hours. Hank would let him.

Later in the night he wakes and listens. Hank's breathing isn't quiet, isn't steady with the odd hitch, the snuff and huff. How his captain sleeps. In his arms or in the station. Hank's breathing is as wide awake as the moon and stars. 

"Cap?"

"Don't call me that," Hank snaps back. His shoulder is rigid and his ribs quiver when Mike passes his hand over them. 

"Sorry. Force of habit."

"Make me feel old," Hank mutters, but it's not what he means, but what he means just keeps slipping, Mike can almost hear it. 

"You know the first time I kissed another boy it was down on the lake?"

Hank doesn't say anything. 

"I didn't know who he was, really. He was here with his family. I was sixteen and me and my big cousin and my uncle were here and I saw him down on the beach and, _wham_ , I thought, I've been missing that in my life."

Hank's breathing doesn't steady. Mike curves close to him like a question and runs his fingers through the hair on Hank's arm. 

"I thought he was something else but, you know how sixteen is, you think just about anything on two legs is God's gift to beautiful."

Hank is quiet a long time. Mike listens. "If I'd let myself think, at sixteen, some other boy was beautiful I think I'd have thrown myself off a trestle."

"I would've thought you were."

"God. No. I was all legs and arms, skinny as a rail, skinnier than Johnny, ate about as much as he does, couldn't keep my hair combed or my feet straight."

"Bet you ten to one somebody had an eye on you."

Hank is quiet again. The clouds outside have cleared and the moon, not quite full, paints the cabin in silver and blue. "He did."

"Yeah?"

"I guess twenty's not so far off from sixteen, but you'd think, after being in the army, I might've had a little more sense knocked into me. Enough to see it."

Listen. Listen, in the silver and the blue. Listen, there's a breeze trickling through the pines. No shadows to hide in. People think the night is black but it's not.

"He was my Captain. 'Course that was 'cause he told me to put in for his station. At the Academy. Told me he'd fix it up, told me all the things you wanna hear, best in my class, best probie he'd seen in years."

Hank curls back against him. His back arches. Chest to spine. Skin to skin. They smell like lakewater. They smell like wool and musty sheets and pine resin. 

"Told me I was handsome. And I liked that too. I wanted to hear it."

"What happened?"

Hank takes a long slow breath in and heaves a long slow sigh out. "It was always what he wanted, when he wanted. I had a building come down on me, broke my shoulder, and all I wanted was for him to come by, tell me it was alright, tell me I hadn't screwed up, tell me - hell. Tell me I was still alive. Barely spoke to me for the whole time I was out. Came back in, three days later we're coming off a brushfire and he wants me back in his bed."

Mike nods. Against Hank's shoulder. He wonders how it broke. How the bone fragmented. Clean fracture. Rough shatter. Knocked out of true. There's no scar, the skin unbroken. 

"I did what I had to. Under the circumstances." 

Mike listens. Can feel Hank shivering. He knows every muscle on his captain's body, and all of them are tight as steel traps against his touch. 

"Surprised I ever made it to engineer, nevermind captain."

"What'd you do?"

"Tell you sometime. If you keep it secret."

"Why would I tell?"

Hank rolls over and scrutinizes him. "Why would you?"

"I'm not like that."

"No," Hank says. Very soft. "No, you're not, are you."

Mike pulls him closer. Their foreheads touch. He shuts his eyes. A draft slides in the window and strokes his bare arm and tickles the hair at the back of his neck and he touches the back of Hank's neck like he's going to pin the breeze down there and catch it and wring the stars out of it. 

They don't fall asleep for a long, long time.


End file.
